Highlights from the last GUI Olympics

Two years ago we had the first GUI Olympics. And out of that contest over a hundred skins competed. The winning team was from deviantART with LotsOfSkins a close second. Grayhaze won the top individual score in points with his "MetalX" skin that had multiple sub-styles in it.

This year, team deviantART has an impressive array of skin authors lined up. But one change from lat time has been that skinners can choose to form their own teams. The three major pro skin houses, Pixtudio, Skinplant, and The Skins Factory, are all their own teams.

Here are some highlights from last time around:

LOS was a skin put together by Pixtudio. It was creative and yet quite usable. In the past year, a lot of people have pointed out an increasing desire by skin authors to move towards download counts rather than making cool new things that they themselves like. That's one of the advantages of the GUI Olympics, skin authors aren't judged by how "mass market" friendly their skin is. The skins are judged by the people who actually make the software along with leaders in the customization community.

Seti Green from DavidK did very well too. It was downloaded by 70,000 different people (WinCustomize / GUI Olympics tracks downloads by # of unique individuals -- some sites have vastly inflated download counts because they count aborted or repeat downloads). Needless to say, this was a very popular and creative skin. Look at the way the title bar was done.

MetalX by Grayhaze was one of the two skins Grayhaze submitted during the contest. But that's really not being fair. MetalX won more awards than any other skin because it had so many different sub-styles. It technically was one skin but it had modes for both power users, minimalistic users, and casual users (don't let the screenshot fool you). It won both in terms of user voting and via the judges. Grayhaze represented the smaller skin site, VelocityArt which helped put it on the map at the time. It was downloaded by nearly 110,000 different people.

Organix and other skins by MindlessPuppet allowed him to do very well in the creative events of the 2002 GUI Olympics. Most people looking at these skins would say "I wouldn't run that". But that wasn't the point. Top skinners are able to beat the challenge of creating something that is new and different even if they wouldn't be mainstream.

So there you have it. The last GUI Olympics focused only on WindowBlinds skinning. This time, Winamp 5 skinning and Icons are involved. And skinning has gone mainstream since 2002. Some of the winners of the GUI Olympics 2002 went on to become professional skin authors making skins for companies ranging from Nintendo, Microsoft, ATI, nVidia, Sony, and dozens of other companies who now see skinning as a way of branding their user interface for their users.